Avid student of Chinese history here. One thing that bothered me was just how massive the armies were in famous battles recorded throughout Chinese history. During the warring states period, countries regularly fielded armies of 200,000 men or more. In the battle of Changping, for instance, the state of Zhao was supposed to have suffered 400,000 in casualties. When the first emperor conquered Chu, the invasion force was supposed to have been over 600,000 men.
The ability to field massive armies of over half a million men can be seen again and again throughout Chinese history, during the Han, Three Kingdoms, and so on.
So I was wondering how much of this was exaggeration and how much of it was fact. I believe that Cao Cao deliberately inflated his numbers at the battle of the Red Cliffs. So how consistent was this practice and should we take most of these numbers with a grain of salt? Is there a consensus among mainstream historians on this?
For comparison, the Romans would not field more than a few legions at once, and the differences between East and West just seems too big.
Hello,
Generally yes, in my opinion Chinese ancient history when it comes to battles, army size and casualties, tends to be highly exaggerated.
Take the Battle of Changping (~260 BCE) where 450,000 soldiers of Zhao were killed by the forces of Qin, of which 400,000 Zhao prisoners were afterwards executed by Qin archers and buried alive after the battle under the orders of general Bai-Qi. Around 240 Zhao survivors were released to spread terror. This is according to historian Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian 太史公書 (Shiji - 史記), which is our main source on the battle and most Chinese history from that period.
So is this number of 450,000 dead accurate?
Of course not and it can be dismissed right away as an exaggeration using logic. First of all, the number of soldiers itself seems far too large for the time. Think about how extremely large a battlefield that would have to be for nearly a million soldiers combined to fight in ancient warfare style melees. Also psychologically I'm sure it would be humanely possible to kill that many defenseless people in such a short period of time and I don't believe Qin soldiers would have the moral degeneracy to do that genocidal crime to an enemy that they wouldn't have regarded as less than human. Were Zhao prisoners executed? Absolutely, probably in the many thousands and mass graves do exist on site to corroborate them being buried alive, but it was definitely not hundreds of thousands of executions on a genocidal scale.
Regarding the sources used by Sima Qian, he admitted himself how little Zhao sources were available because their libraries were destroyed by the Qin for having sources critical of them so he only had the victors perspective of the battle. And the victors were known for exaggerating their army size and the casualties inflicted on their enemy, to make their victory would seem more extraordinary and epic than it actually was. This is a trend common in ancient Chinese historiography where our modern idea of objective history-telling simply did not exist, and history was recorded for the purpose to idealize the sovereign, create entertaining and interesting epic stories and it was exaggerated to the point of myth. The ancient books written on bamboo and wooden slips from the Qin archive were according to Sima Qian himself in 史記 often brief, fragmentary/incomplete and contradictory. Also when we get into numbers like 250,000, 500,000, 600,000, 800,000, they all became very relative and take the Battle of Red Cliffs for example, two dramatically different figures provided with the first one by Chao-Chao of 800,000 men on his side, while his opposite Zhou Yu claimed he had 220,000. This speaks to the exaggeration on the part of the side recording the battle, and there is a difference of hundreds of thousands, an enormous number that was just thrown around alot without actual consideration.
Take this into consideration on top of the fact the account of the battle in 史記 (94 BCE) was written over a century and a half after it occurred, and as was typical overtime information became less accurate especially as it was passed down over the generations orally. What were once accurate facts and testimonies from a reliable contemporary eyewitness became exaggerated overtime for purposes of story-telling and it almost became myth and folklore after hundreds of years. According to Sima Qian when writing his book he traveled across China to interview people and corroborate his information obtained from the archives, and he took special consideration to exclude myth and folklore surrounding monarchs like the Five Emperors who were associated with deities because he wanted to write an accurate portrayal of Chinese history. He was a good historian for his time but when it came to battles he had to rely on and use the exaggerated figures he had available.
Now lastly China had a huge population at the time (42,000,000 in 200 BCE) and it was certainly possible for hundreds of thousands to be gathered to fight in one army, but "millions" of soldiers would have been impossible. The Roman population had an estimated 45.5m in 14 CE to China's 65m in 1 CE, and this wasnt a huge difference.